Concentration

How long can you concentrate? An hour? Two hours? Or maybe only for a minute or two?

I'm starting to think this little question and the whole subject of concentration is important - or if not important, at least interesting, [or maybe just interesting to me. ok maybe its not that big a deal - never mind].


[Damn!!  I wanted to write this simply an clearly but my internal chatter got in the way. F___, what an idiot! You'd think I could stay focused for at least 5 minutes - but no! I trailed off into this cesspool of idea / counteridea/ self criticism/ self justification...]

That little real life episode is part of my internal chatter which is with me always. I call it my monkey-brain - and it SUCKS! It poisons almost everything. Sometimes I am aware of it happening, but most of the time it takes me over completely and I find a half hour or a half day has passed and all I have done is have some internal incoherent conversation about [who knows what].

What joy it must be not to have to listen to my monkey brain!  That is why I think concentration is important. I am going to define concentration as "non-monkey-brain-thinking". It is focus/thinking devoid of the internal chatter of emotional justification/criticism [the monkey brain].

[to be continued and edited]

"Its the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." [R.E.M.]

I am starting to think that we humans have a secret desire for the world to end. 

Just think about it: If the world ended there would be no more suffering, no more hunger, jealousy - no more hate groups. You wouldn’t have to worry about disappointing anyone, not being rich enough, slim enough.... Sounds like a good deal!

Furthermore, depending on exactly how the world ends, you can feel justified in your beliefs that those damn Muslims or Capitalists or [substitute your favorite person to blame] were probably the cause. The feeling of moral justification would be worth it. “I knew those bastards would kill us all”. Sweet!

And best of all, if the world ended, no one could blame you for any of this. “Hey I can’t come in to work today - the world is ending.”  Or, “I thought about committing suicide, but that would be wrong. But if the world ends - not my fault.”

I have probably suspected the truth in this “end of the world” theory for a long while, but it recently became clearer to me after I read a book on the Apostle Paul. [ Paul by E.P Sanders ].

Paul was perhaps the most important character in early Christianity (first century CE) - maybe even more important than Jesus himself. It was Paul who popularized Christianity among the non-Jews. [Ok not just Paul - but he gets all the credit] He went around setting up churches and spreading the word of God as told to him in a vision. Paul spoke with authority independent of Jesus’s own teaching [he never met the living Jesus] since he had a direct pipeline to God.

One of Paul’s big selling points - or at least one of his driving beliefs - was that the world was about to end and that people needed to convert now or it might be too late. Paul seems to have originally believed the world would end during his lifetime but as time went on, that was amended to “really soon” and [I suspect] the sooner the better.

But it wasn’t just Paul spreading this end of the world scenario. There were a lot of other religions popping up at the time and many of them predicted the imminent end of the world. Apparently it was a big selling point for new religions at the time.

At first, it seemed strange to hear that so many in the early Roman empire were so fixated on the world ending. [I have since read reasonable explanations (plagues, Parthians etc) and the whole subject sounds like a great sociology topic. ] But then I realized that it wasn’t just the Romans of the first century CE who were fixed on the world ending. The fact that the world was about to end has been a justification for religious fervor ever since.

My theory is that this is not isolated to Christianity or religion in general. It is a basic human desire/need that religions address. Buddha addressed it directly. His "first noble truth" is that life is suffering, and his teachings address how to end suffering. He doesn’t promote the “end of the world” scenario - but it is that the human condition is one of suffering and suffering should/can end.

And its not just in religion. Look at popular culture. There are movies every year where some asteroid is about to hit the earth, or some plague turns 99% of the world into zombies, or there is an alien invasion. Isn’t there a popular belief that the Mayan’s predicted the world will end in 2012? These are all playing to our secret desire for it all to end. And the politics of fear .... don’t get me started.

I was watching a movie the other day and one of the characters was ranting to himself and said:  “I wish this were all over”.  That sounded so familiar.

I don’t want to come across morbid or that I sit around actively wishing for the end of the world. But I do believe that Buddha may be onto something and that we all have a desire for suffering to end. And that this desire to end suffering takes many odd shapes throughout human history and culture.

The easiest way for most to us to imagine the end of suffering is for all of this to simply end. And we pay good money on books, movies, churches and politics that play on that wish.  But we typically keep the wish itself a secret.